Splitscreen in general is not complicated in Irrlicht, see tutorial 18

In my special case you can have 2-4 player splitscreen. I just use a switch-case block for all the options to define the size of the screen part for each player and store it as a irr::core::reci object.

If shadows are active I then create a render-to-target texture for each player with the size of the rect defined before. XEffects "update" function takes the RTT texture as optional parameter, so not much to do here. Afterwards I copy the content of the texture to the screen.

I have to see if I can create a texture from part of the screen so that I don't have to copy the texture to the screen because this costs a lot of performance (see video - 30 FPS on my old Core I5 with a GTX650 (or similar )) GFX card.

In single player mode I use the same base class but don't use the render target path for performance reasons

it works without problems, although splitscreen drops the framerate a lot - rendering to texture I guess. XEffects is great as I don't have the time to dig into shadow mapping myself . I'll keep posting here as soon as I have new features. At the moment I'm working on race replay - similar to what I had in my "Stunt Marble Racers", but this time it will of course be better

I just uploaded a new version: with the first iteration of the race replay. You can now save replays of all races (time trial with or without ghost, splitscreen, network client and server) and view them later on. There is still some work to do: in multiplayer games you only see the perspective of player 1, in-game HUD is not yet up to date and the race result is not shown, I'll work on that. Hope you like it.

You can download the ghosts that are stored here and race against them. The ghost files are stored in "C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Roaming\DustbinGames\Marbles3\Ghosts". Download a ghost, copy it to that location and you can race against them.

The page does also include an option to upload a ghost (at the very bottom) so I'd like to see some ghosts being uploaded so that other players (and I) have something to compete.

The next step will be to include both the download and the upload function into the game. I hope you like the idea and use it a lot .

This time I added some sort of "asynchronous multiplayer" (Part 1): there is a new menu point "Ghosts" in the "Update" Menu:

When you select this menu point a list of available online ghosts is downloaded from https://dustbin-online.de/marbles3/. In the next menu you can select a track, download a ghost, view a ghost or race against a ghost from the internet:

Just uploaded a new version to http://dustbin-online.de/dowload/marbles3.zip. This time I have added a "publish ghost" function. Now you can do a time trial and after saving the ghost a "publish" button appears which lets you upload the ghost to http://dustbin-online.de/marbles3/. I hope you like it, and I hope someone posts some ghosts for some kind of offline-racing. I'd love to see if I can beat you with the experience I have in this little game

I have spent the last 2 weeks creating an installer for the game. It can be downloaded from http://www.dustbin-online.de. The ZIP file is also still available and updated at http://dustbin-online.de/download/marbles3.zip. The installer was created with the WIX Toolset (http://wixtoolset.org/ .. bad name in germany ). To do this I have packed all the data (except for the XEffects shaders) into an archive (marbles3.dat - just another renamed ZIP archive) and I had to do some more adjustments to get it to work: I have updated to Irrlicht 1.9, but after some evenings fiddling around it finally works.

Unfortunately I do not (yet) have a code signing certificate so you need to tell WIndows very often that you want to install it despite being from the Web and not signed. I hope you like it nevertheless.

Hey I think you are really into something here, it's got a bit of the 'hook' necessary for games. Good job!Some suggestions though:

-Modernize the Looks of text and buttons, they are too pixelated. If I'm not mistaken Direct 2D can draw to the 3D viewport for antialiased text and shapes. Or might just use bitmaps.-Spelling needs to be checked.-Make the marble translucent with some refraction and reflections mapping, should be straightforward since it's only one.-The shadow of the marble could be just a 'flexible' plane with the alpha shadow texture. This way you wouldn't have to run real time shadows and could bake everything else. Something like this would be nice-More and better sounds.-Racetrack layout thumbnail on racetrack selection menu.-On windowed mode, the cursor disappears under the close button.-Maybe some particle effects.

- modernize UI: I am not fully satisfied with the look of the UI, but this is not a top-prio task at the moment- Spelling: shame on me - Translucent: I'll have to see what I can do there. I will try to create my own (more minimal) shader because XEffects looks great but runs slow on systems with low GPU power- Sound: some more sounds are planned as well. Especially moving objects on the tracks need to produce some sound as well- Cursor: I'll take a look at that. On my system it works as expected. During a race the cursor should be hidden, but maybe only in fullscreen mode

At the moment (after two weeks of vacation ) I need to do some work on background tools I use, e.g. for the management of the tracks.

I hope I'll be able to do something for the project, but ATM my time is more limited than usually - moved to a new apartment during the vacation, and there is still a whole lot of work to do there as well - and my girlfriend wants me to focus on that

after almost 2 months without the time to do something new I uploaded a new version to http://dustbin-online.de/download/marbles3.zip. Apart from a lot of small fixes and improvements there is one thing that I like most: After you have done a Time Trial on a track your time is directly compared to the ghost files that are already online so you get your online rank immediately. You can then submit your lap to the list. At the moment there is no authentication for submitting a ghost file but I might add something in the future. Here's a screenshot:

Note that there are demo ghosts for every included track, but beating those ghosts is not really difficult as I have recorded these ghosts to show the tracks.